By Judy Garrison

I had no hesitation in watching this documentary the day I saw it on Prime Video. I had read Katharine Graham’s excellent and mesmerizing autobiography, Personal History, when it came out, had seen her depicted by Meryl Streep in the 2017 movie, The Post, where her role as publisher of The Washington Post highlights the tense period when she wrangled with the difficult decision of whether to give permission to publish The Pentagon Papers. Still, I was hungry for more. (In All the President’s Men-1976 the only mention of her is in the infamous threat delivered by then-attorney general John Mitchell: Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.) My beloved cousin Kay had been Kay Graham’s personal assistant in the early sixties, and so I also had some personal curiosity. But my main motive then and now was to hear the story of this woman’s rise, and to get an inside look at those Watergate years.

The one hour 32-minute documentary by brothers George and Teddy Kanhardt uses an appropriately traditional format, interweaving archival material with talking head interviews, always with Kay Graham’s voice at front and center. The arc of a competent but painfully shy and self-abnegating daughter and wife rising to the status of a captain of industry at the heart of cultural change, making courageous and impactful decisions, is so delicious that our attention never flags.

She, along with her editor, Ben Bradlee, is an avid supporter of freedom of the press, and the principle of upholding it and the people’s right to know against the power of a deceitful federal government (echoes to today). But she wavers as some advisers strongly caution her that in publishing the Papers (The New York Times was already under a restraining order in June 1971 and a Supreme Court hearing was pending) that in exercising first amendment rights she and Bradley may lose the paper and maybe their skins.

Graham surprised everyone after the death of her husband Phil Graham by suicide, assuming the helm he had been granted by her father, Eugene Meyer, the previous Post publisher and chairman of the board of Newsweek. The Post board expected her to sell, but she was too invested in the paper to make that move, though it took a year before she would ask a question at an editorial meeting.

The Washington Post had been an important but local publication, even though based in the nation’s capital. With the decision in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers—also published by The New York Times—and then assuming the lone, and at first lonely, role in reporting on the Watergate scandal (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein lead the investigation into the 1972 Watergate break-in guided by editor Ben Bradlee) it gained national impact. Unlike some publishers in times of controversy, she staunchly had the backs of her reporters and editor.

Graham acknowledges that things would have been far different without the revelation and release of Richard Nixon’s secret White House tapes. We as viewers of this documentary are privy to the voices and texts as Nixon and his advisors plot against the “miserable bitch” they deem her to be, assured of their power to de-throne her. We learn how Nixon openly threatened to withhold some of the TV licenses of the Post’s stations in retaliation. Through this fraught time the company stock dropped almost by half, attracting the attention of none other than the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett.  He bought a huge amount of nonvoting secondary stock which determined her to fly out to California to meet him in person. Their subsequent friendship and his role as her mentor in the ways of finance and business is beautiful to witness.

She had more difficult decisions to make during The Washington Post 1975 labor dispute. Back as a journalist on the West Coast when fresh out of college—and before marrying, giving up journalism and assuming the role of helpmate and mother—she had befriended printing press operators, for whom she clearly had sympathy and admiration.  And yet, with the survival of this legacy family enterprise now at stake, during the strikes she hired non-union workers and involved herself in the day-to-day requirements. Her primary objective was to do whatever was necessary in order insure the paper’s survival.

But do see it all for yourselves, and see if you, like me, view Kay Graham, not as an icy and over-privileged scion of the upper class, but—along with Gloria Steinam—assess her as a vulnerable, principled and brave woman who mounted the bulwarks during crucial social and political challenges. And in so doing helped advance the status of working women in America—all without ever feeling the need to call herself a feminist.~